46. The Prince

46

THE PRINCE

T ime seemed to slip away as the minutes and hours blurred together in a haze. The prince drifted in and out of sleep, his mind still a jumbled mess of fragmented memories and half-formed thoughts, but things were not as chaotic as they had been when he had first become aware. He wondered why he felt calm instead of frantic.

It was the smell.

The female, Jasmine, the one who was named after a white, sweet-smelling flower. She didn't smell sweet, not entirely. There were spicy and musky undertones, too, and he wondered whether the scent was natural or artificial.

Feeling the first tendrils of wakefulness pulling at his eyelids, he opened his eyes, a smile lifting his lips when he saw her sitting by his bed and still holding on to his hand.

"Well, hello." She grinned at him. "I'm so happy that seeing me makes you smile. You must be feeling a little better."

"I do feel better, and seeing you makes me happy." He tried to squeeze her fingers, but his hand didn't obey his command.

He couldn't remember if he had ever held a female's hand other than his sister's. He must have held his mother's hand but didn't remember that either. How old was he?

"You are sad again. What were you just thinking about?"

"I do not know how old I am. Is there a way to tell?"

"I can tell you are an adult, but I do not know enough about your kind to even try to guess your age."

"What is my kind?"

"Don't you remember anything besides your sister?"

He had a feeling that she was avoiding answering on purpose. Maybe she didn't know what he was.

Maybe he was a survivor of a crash landing on a distant planet?

Something tickled his memory again.

A uniform.

It was a disguise. He had never worn one before. He had been used to comfortable, loose robes…

Princely robes?

"You are remembering something," Jasmine said. "I can tell by the faraway look in your eyes."

"It's just fragments. I remember wearing loose robes, I remember the feel of the fabric on my skin, and I remember vowing to my mother that I would protect my sister with my life." His eyes prickled with tears. "But I failed. She was hurt."

Jasmine intertwined her fingers with his. "You didn't fail. Your sister is alive, and she's getting stronger every day."

"Not thanks to anything I did."

"How do you know that? You don't remember anything. You might have done heroic acts to save your sister, and she might be alive thanks to you."

"I wish that was true." He knew it wasn't.

He wasn't injured. He hadn't fought for his sister. Something happened to both of them. But what could it have been to render them both unconscious while not injuring them?

But wait, what if he was injured and did not know it? He could barely feel his body. He was numb all over. Perhaps the medics gave him something to numb the pain of his injuries.

"Am I wounded?" he asked. "Is my sister?"

Jasmine frowned. "I thought you knew what happened to make you weak and forget everything. You and your sister were in stasis for a very long time. We found you, brought you here, and the medics resuscitated you. It takes time for your bodies to replenish themselves."

He was not sure he knew what stasis was, but he could guess. Had it been natural or induced?

He took a deep, shuddering breath, trying to steady and anchor himself in the present moment. "Where did you find me?"

"A place very far from here. Your escape pod landed on a mountain and made a big hole." She hesitated. "Only you and your sister survived. The others in your pod didn't. I'm so sorry."

Another tear escaped his eye for the lives lost of people he couldn't remember. "Tell me about this place."

"Where we found you?"

"Yes, and everything else in this world." He needed a distraction from the sadness. Something good to lift his spirits and make him feel like there was hope for him and his sister. Like there was a reason he was there.

Other than Jasmine, that is.

Perhaps he was meant to arrive on this world to find her?

She hesitated. "I don't know where to start. There is so much. There are so many different people, cultures, and ways of life. Some good and some not so much. It's a place of great beauty, but also great danger, a place where anything is possible, for better or for worse."

He nodded. "Tell me more about the people. In what ways are they different from one another?"

She took a deep breath. "This planet orbits a star that we call the sun. We have oceans and mountains, forests and deserts, great cities with millions of people living in them, and vast wildernesses and deserts where there are no people at all."

He listened, enraptured, as Jasmine painted vivid pictures with her words of towering structures that seemed to touch the clouds, all kinds of vehicles that moved on land, oceans, and the sky, and other technologies that, for some reason, failed to impress him. He found the many different races and cultures, each with their traditions and beliefs and their many different ways of seeing the world, fascinating.

"But for all its wonders, Earth is also a place of great strife and conflict," Jasmine said. "There are wars and famines, injustices and cruelties, but there is also great kindness and compassion, people who dedicate their lives to helping others and making the world a better place."

What she was describing resonated with him. "Good and evil, creation and destruction, life and death, honor and dishonor. It's all a duality." He closed his eyes. "I don't even know what it means, but I'm supposed to know."

Jasmine sighed. "You were raised to be a priest. You should know those things. They will come back to you."

He frowned. "So, you know things about me. Why didn't you tell me before?"

She lowered her eyes. "I didn't want to tell you that."

"Why not?"

"Because I wanted you to like me."